not so random musings and mutterings about high performance computing, business, entrepreneurship, and the economy

OT: T+7 hours … its done

Bilateral Mastectomy with a sentinel node biopsy. The latter appears to be clean. I can exhale now. Well, mostly. The more detailed pathology data should be ready next week.

The rebuilding part is in process. Another few hours. Readying some good jokes to keep the Mrs. happy. Let her know not to worry.

U of M hospital guest internet is … annoying. Looks like they let 3 TCP ports out to the world (22, 80, 443). Possibly some others. I had to work some VPN magic to be able to send/check email. And of course, the cell phone doesn’t work here (sigh).

[update] And its done. She’s in the wake up room, and once shes done, they’ll move her to the observation area.

Very glad to hear it went well Joe, please pass on our best wishes to your wife! Surprised to hear they went straight to a bilateral mastectomy for a DCIS (which by definition hasn’t become invasive yet, otherwise it wouldn’t be in-situ) – was it a comedocarcinoma by some chance ?

That’s part of what Donna had and the reason she’s having a prophylatic second mastectomy this coming February.

@Chris
Yes, grade 3, Comedo, ER+ and PR+. They recommended a mastectomy, and after speaking to many people, reading up on it, speaking to the oncologist, we focused upon a bilateral mastectomy, with prophylatic removal of the non-diseased tissue. This is apparently becoming the common choice of women with DCIS here in the US.

@Jeff

Thanks! We should get the margin report next week, as well as the more thorough report on the SLNB.

Donna’s was similar, but PR- and also multi-focal. Post op they found the tumour was actually 3cm long (grown to that in less than a year) so the clear SLNB had a high chance of being a false-negative and she had to do chemo just in case.

During her journey she’s spoken to a number of women who had lumpectomies originally and had to go back and have mastectomies due to reoccurrence – they’d wished they’d been offered the chance for a mastectomy in the beginning.

Donna had the mastectomy by literally persuading the surgeon on the way to the operating theatre that it was the right way to go (rather than having a lumpectomy as originally planned) and signing the paperwork on the table. She doesn’t regret it a bit.